Led by Motorola's Advanced Technology and Projects group, Project Ara is developing a free, open hardware platform for creating highly modular smartphones. We want to do for hardware what the Android platform has done for software: create a vibrant third-party developer ecosystem, lower the barriers to entry, increase the pace of innovation, and substantially compress development timelines.

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The design for Project Ara consists of what we call an endoskeleton (endo) and modules. The endo is the structural frame that holds all the modules in place. A module can be anything, from a new application processor to a new display or keyboard, an extra battery, a pulse oximeter - or something not yet thought of!

This could be the biggest innovation in smartphones since, well, the first smartphones appeared on the market. I am incredibly excited about this.

Frankly, I'm not so sure about this stuff. Most professional uses of computing are related to much more complex input then slates can provide. Typing documents on touch screen? Photoshop on touchscreen? CAD on touchscreen? Just no way.

See, nothing of the slate is really new. It just got hyped. I owned a PalmOS 5 device, and I'm not exactly sure whether I can't name any single advancement of the current tablets compared to what that device allowed (discarding natural course of technology advancement, of course).

The cloud thing is just again an overblown client-server architecture, this time with a huge single ugly API, which is more of regression than advancement, and more vocal evangelists. Back in the day the concept was killed by increasing processing power of hardware; these days it still increases, and other factors - eg. privacy, long-term availability - are in play. I doubt that cloud computing would survive a major increase in end-users' bandwidth for instance.

Both technologies are hyped, which instigates their adoption rate, but they were already tried more then once, so their dominance really doesn't feel imminent. The only real change is that back in the day these technologies were targeting people who knew their uses, and now they are applied to general consumers.

The cloud thing is just again an overblown client-server architecture, this time with a huge single ugly API, which is more of regression than advancement, and more vocal evangelists.

You don't get it then. Cloud itself has nothing to do with client server arch specifically.

* If I wanna scale my database to meet demand, I just select a dropdown on Amazon ECS. I don't need to do anything else.
* If I want redundancy across Amazon data-centres, I just push the instance onto a different data-centre done.
* If I want to send email, I just call the REST API. Job done.

Sorry working with cloud shit (I been mostly Amazon and Azure) has been a pretty awesome as a developer. I can use whatever tech I want, scale it to suit and do it with minimum fuss.

Traditional server infrastructure can't do that.

Not if you are talking about things that are called "cloud services" when they are really websites or web services .... well that is a different thing entirely.

Do you remember the story of the mainframe and the PC ? This could happen again.

A quick back of the envelope calculation tells me that in 15 years a device the size of a smartphone can have the same processing power, memory capability and storage capability as the IBM Watson has now.